Roman Verostko

Roman Verostko was born in 1929 in Tarrs, Pennsylvania. He studied illustration at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and soon after entered the Benedictine order at Saint Vincent Archabbey. Over the next decade, he studied philosophy, theology, and history while continuing to paint and pursue academic work. He was ordained in 1959 and went on to complete his MFA at Pratt Institute in 1961, with additional studies in New York and Paris. He worked as a contributing editor for the New Catholic Encyclopedia and continued his artistic practice throughout. By the late 1960s, his evolving interests in contemporary art, technology, and education led him to leave the monastic community. In 1968, he married and moved to Minneapolis, where he joined the faculty of the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He taught there for over 25 years, eventually serving as department chair and professor emeritus.

In the early 1970s, Verostko began studying programming and exploring how code could generate form. After learning Fortran at the Control Data Institute and spending time at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, he converted his studio into what he called an “electronic scriptorium,” using custom software and modified plotters to produce rule-based drawings. He wrote all his own code, rejecting commercial design tools in favor of a fully authored system that aligned with his belief in the artist as the originator of both form and process. By 1987, he had adapted his system to control Chinese brushes, creating works that combined algorithmic logic with expressive mark-making. He saw code as a set of instructions for form, what he called a “genotype,” and developed a process rooted in structure, variation, and reflection. Even before learning to program, he had experimented with synchronized sound and image at Saint Vincent, creating audiovisual works like Psalms in Sound and Image, which prefigured his later interest in time-based systems. A founding member of the Algorists, Verostko brought together decades of experience in abstraction, religious study, and symbolic systems to build a uniquely personal visual language informed by semiotics, spiritual tradition, and cross-cultural references including illuminated manuscripts, calligraphy, and medieval logic diagrams.

His work has been shown in more than a hundred exhibitions, including The Algorithmic Revolution at ZKM, Genetic Art – Artificial Life in Linz, Digital Pioneers at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Coder le monde at the Centre Pompidou. His drawings and artist books are held in collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum, ZKM, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Tama Art University Museum in Tokyo. Major works include Epigenesis, Flowers of Learning, and his Illuminated Universal Turing Machine. He received numerous honors for his contributions to generative art, including the Golden Plotter Prize in 1994, a Prix Ars Electronica honorable mention in 1993, and the SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2009. In 2021, Saint Vincent College established the Verostko Center for the Arts, home to the largest collection of his work. He passed away in 2024.